OE-2.5 Applications of AR & VR
You can describe deployed AR/VR applications across entertainment, medicine, aerospace, defence and education, and judge where immersion genuinely adds value.
The application unit is the one that decides whether you leave the course able to argue for a project or only to describe hardware. The pattern worth extracting: immersion pays where the real thing is dangerous, expensive or impossible to rehearse - flight simulation and surgical training, not spreadsheets. Approach the education claims with the same scepticism you would give any technology-in-classrooms promise, since evidence there is thinner than the marketing.
Work through these
Gaming and entertainment; virtual reality and the arts
The application that funded the field, and the one that pushed the hardware hardest. Art is here beside it because artists reached the medium early and asked different questions of it.
Immersive video and cinematic virtual reality
Recorded rather than generated, which changes what the viewer can do. The loss of interactivity is the trade, and knowing why some productions accept it is the content.
Health and medicine: advancing the field, training and treatment applications
Where the field does measurable good: rehearsing a procedure without a patient, and treatment for conditions that respond to controlled exposure. The evidence here is stronger than in most application areas.
Aerospace and defence: flight simulation and training
The oldest serious use, and the one with the clearest economic argument. An hour in a simulator costs a fraction of an hour in an aircraft, which is why the technology existed decades before consumers saw it.
Mission planning and rehearsal; dismounted soldier situational awareness
Rehearsing an operation before it happens, and giving a person on the ground a picture they could not otherwise have. The requirements here drive much of the sensing hardware above.
Advanced cockpit avionics; space operations
Putting information in front of a pilot without them looking away, and doing the same beyond the atmosphere. These are the demanding cases that expose latency problems.
Education: tangible skills, theory, knowledge acquisition and concept formation
The application area most of you will actually build for. The useful distinction is between skills that transfer to the real task and impressions that only feel like learning.
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